That’s not to say the whole THING is good: I found the asterisks distracting, but, well, it made noticing your shifts hella easy; also, the characters themselves aren’t as vibrant as the ones in your other one- or two-person pieces, because of the obvious: it’s hard to spend enough time on them. Sandra and… buddy… oh yeah, Eddie, felt pretty watered down — see? I can’t even remember his name. But that’s OK, Eddie seemed a bit like a token, anyways. The tradegy here would be how Sandra turned out. I mean, some dude killed a bunch of guys because of her. And when I got to that part, I found myself asking, “Well, WHY did he do that? I mean, OK, I get that they were lovers, but I didn’t really feel any investment in that relationship.”

But, I get the feeling things turned out that way because this was one of your off-the-top-of-your-head pieces — something that was just rattled off. If that’s true then this was very well-done, given the circumstances. But I’m thinking just one more conversation between Sandra and Stan would have solidified their characters sufficiently enough — if you’re looking to edit this, some day.

I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m trying to tear you a new one — that’s not my intention at all! There are bits and pieces that I like about this one. I’m ust “coaching for performance” (I just went through a workshop for just that at work. I swear, people will quit their jobs over me).

That said, my OTHER motivation for writing this was to try and write something with multiple characters. Most of my work includes only one or two characters, giving me plenty of time to develop them and make them all whiny and angsty and stuff. In a story like this, told third-person, I was forced to try to establish all these characters not only in a short space, but also almost entirely through their actions and dialogue.

I don’t know how well it worked, but it was kind of fun to write.

1) I’m starting to do this thing, when I read your stuff; I let it sit in my mind, and I go to sleep. It’s interesting to see what remains when I wake up. I like to consider those elements some of the strongpoints of the piece.

For this one, it’s tension. I feel a lot of tension in the air — the death of Stan hangs in the air rather thickly. Haven’t felt this kind of tension in your pieces before.

2) Like, all of the names you used in this TBT are the names of my co-workers: Paul is the person who replaced me when I got promoted; Sandra is a girl I used to work with who recently got promoted to the same position I hold; Derek was someone on the team I used to look after (he was also my soccer team’s captain), and Eddie, well, this one’s a bit of a stretch, but my current boss’s name is Ed. No one calls him Eddie. After this story, I wouldn’t want to. Creepy.